The Limits of Rule 13

President Obama, we are told, is an avid student of Saul Alinsky, the lefty that developed the art of community organizing into a science.  And nothing that Alinsky said or did eclipses his famous Rule 13 on page 130 of Rules for Radicals.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

That's how you keep your supporters amped up and committed to the cause.



But there's a problem and I trust that the president and his handlers understand it.  The whole lefty political-action playbook is based on a vital assumption.  It is that "we", the community organizer and his flock, are the underdogs.  "We" are oppressed and marginalized by the big corporation or the big government that bears down on us and exploits us like slaves, and against which we are peacefully protesting.



But suppose that "we" is the Obama administration of the United States of America.  Doesn't it get a bit difficult to pose as the underdog when you have $3.8 trillion, the Pentagon, the FBI, the Justice Department and the EPA at your command?



This morning there's a flap about an Obama internet ad that attacks Sarah Palin, among others.  Was this wise?  Let us count the ways:

1. What with the movie Game Change I thought Sarah Palin was an ignorant idiot that didn't know what the Fed does.  So why would she be worth the bother of an attack?  All it does it give her the opportunity to sound like she knows something after all. "Party like it's 1773" and all that.


2. It deploys the power and might of the United States government against a private person.  Liberals have demolished whole National Forests declaiming against the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s.  You'll remember that the big deal was using the power of government to persecute innocent individuals with unpopular views.


3. Back to the point about Alinsky.  If you are the government, and you are freezing, personalizing, and polarizing some individual, a lot of people are going to think, wow, next thing they will be coming for me.

There is no question that the president and his top aides, men like red-diaper baby David Axelrod, are really smart when it comes to the day-to-day tactics of political campaigns.  But you don't want to give a has-been like Sarah Palin a chance to write this about the president's failures:

Just off the top of my head, a few of these concerning issues include: a debt crisis that has us hurtling towards a Greek-style collapse, entitlement programs going bankrupt, a credit downgrade for the first time in our history, a government takeover of the health care industry that makes care more expensive and puts a rationing panel of faceless bureaucrats between you and your doctor (aka a “death panel”), $4 and $5 gas at the pump exacerbated by an anti-drilling agenda that rejects good paying energy sector jobs and makes us more dependent on dangerous foreign regimes, a war in Afghanistan that seems unfocused and unending, a global presidential apology tour that’s made us look feeble and ridiculous, a housing market in the tank, the longest streak of high unemployment since World War II, private-sector job creators and industry strangled by burdensome regulations and an out-of-control Obama EPA, an attack on the Constitutional protection of religious liberty, an attack on private industry in right-to-work states, crony capitalism run amok in an administration in bed with their favored cronies to the detriment of genuine free market capitalism, green energy pay-to-play kickbacks to Obama campaign donors, and a Justice Department still stonewalling on a bungled operation that armed violent Mexican drug lords and led to the deaths of hundreds of innocent people.



I’m sure I missed a few things, but the list is just for starters.

I know, I know.  Sarah Palin didn't actually write all that (although it does contain some of her rhetorical tics like "fearful" and "detriment").  But then President Obama doesn't write his stuff either.



I tell you what I think.  I think that in the last week we've seen some blood in the water.  Everyone thought the Obama administration was cleaning up on its opponents and winning the message war.  Yet all of a sudden, the polls are turning south and the president looks vulnerable.  So maybe while the courtiers were applauding the Obamis were shooting themselves in the foot.



And here's why.  I think that the American people expect the president to be presidential.  He is, after all, supposed to be president of all the people, not just his liberal base.  It's a tricky thing, running for reelection as president.  You want to destroy your opponent, but you need to present yourself as the sunny, confident father of the people.  It's not as easy as it looks.

"Yes We Can," Mr President

You remember the good old days.  When Candidate Obama campaigned around the country exclaiming: "Yes We Can!"



But now he's running around whining that no, we can't.  The late Steve Jobs complained about this to Walter Isaacson, his biographer.  Remember the dinner that Obama had with Silicon Valley tech titans?  It didn't go very well.

According to his biography, when Jobs organized a dinner of Internet executives with Mr. Obama, he concluded, "The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done." He added, "It infuriates me."

Golly, who would have thought it?  Here's another meeting Jobs had with the president.

In Jobs’s meeting with Obama, held at the Westin San Francisco Airport in the fall of 2010, he told the president that setting up factories in China was easier than in the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult. Jobs also criticized the American education system, calling it “crippled by union work rules.”

 Gosh!  Obama's America is a place where "No, we can't."  What went wrong?



Now we have the president's ill-considered No We Can't Have $2.50 a Gallon Gasoline remarks.  Newt Gingrich has suggested that if we pursue an all-of-the-above energy strategy we can get to $2.50 a gallon gasoline, down from its present $4.00 per gallon.



No we can't, said the president in his weekly radio address.

But you and I both know that with only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices – not when consume 20 percent of the world’s oil. We need an all-of-the-above strategy that relies less on foreign oil and more on American-made energy – solar, wind, natural gas, biofuels, and more.

Lots of people on the left jumped in and agreed with the president, people like Ezra Klein. But others have pointed out that the president just doesn't understand how markets work.  Markets anticipate the future, so if the president really implemented an all-of-the-above policy with regard to fossil fuels and allowed more drilling on federal lands, allowed drilling offshore, okayed the Keystone pipeline, kept the EPA out of gasoline formulations, etc., you would see a change in gasoline prices.  A lot bigger than anyone would think.



But of course liberals don't want that kind of energy policy.  That is why they all jump in and say it is impossible.  They believe in Peak Oil, in global warming, in CO2 as a pollutant, in getting out of cars and into mass transit, in future technologies like wind and solar, and on and on.  The last thing they want is low gasoline prices, except in the two months before a presidential election when gas prices are hovering around $4.00 per gallon and Americans are hollering for relief.



But we have a different idea.  Yes we can, Mr. President.  Because Big Government is all about Can't.  And Americans are all about Can Do.

Does a Happy Man Need Friends?

Can a solitary man be happy? Maybe. But if you are Aristotle, and you believe that "man is a political creature and one whose nature is to live with others" it would be strange for a happy man to live like a Hindu sadhu in solitary contemplation.

Some people, Aristotle notes, disagree. They say that the fortunate man doesn't need friends. But they are missing the point, at least in Aristotelian terms. For such a person measures other people by their usefulness. His friends are the second-class friends that are not founded on "goodwill" but pure utility or pleasure.  Enough of him!

That is not Aristotle's way. For him, happiness, eudaimonia, is full human flourishing, and full human flourishing must mean friends of the best kind: other virtuous men full of practical wisdom that do the right thing for the right reason in the right way at the right time. A happy, virtuous man needs friends, not for what they can do for him, but for what he can do for them. For a happy, virtuous man will want to spread the wealth around.

And besides, a solitary man would find it hard to be "continuously active," says Aristotle, and since activity is in itself pleasant, therefore friends are needed to provide the occasion for activity. Not only that, but "a certain training in virtue arises also from the company of the good." Even in Aristotle's time, people had to "use it or lose it." And that goes for virtue.

And besides (again?), just as life for animals is perception, life for man is defined "by the power of perception or thought". Thus to perceive and think and see that we perceive and think, and to perceive that one lives is in itself pleasant etc., etc., and since life is desirable and pleasant so then will be the perception of the life of a man's friend, because all the happiness and pleasure of considering one's own life will apply to the consideration of one's friend's life, "and this will be realized in their living together and sharing in discussion and thought".

Oh good. So that is settled. You can see, as so often in Aristotle, the charming hidden agenda. The purpose of life is to sit around and philosophize with a worthy friend. So therefore the happy man, reaching his full flourishing, is a man with the capability and the virtue to philosophize wisely--with a like-virtuous and happy friend. Q.E.D.

ObamaCare's Culture of Compulsion

It's tempting to ask the Catholic Church: where were you?  Now, finally, at the eleventh hour, the leaders of the US Catholic Church have come out and opposed ObamaCare on the grounds that it forces Catholic employers to pay for contraception and abortifacient services in violation of long-standing Church moral policy about contraception and abortion.



After all, the Catholic Church, at least since the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, has held to the principle of subsidiarity.  From Wikipedia:

The principle is based upon the autonomy and dignity of the human individual, and holds that all other forms of society, from the family to the state and the international order, should be in the service of the human person. Subsidiarity assumes that these human persons are by their nature social beings, and emphasizes the importance of small and intermediate-sized communities or institutions, like the family, the church, labor unions and other voluntary associations, as mediating structures which empower individual action and link the individual to society as a whole. "Positive subsidiarity", which is the ethical imperative for communal, institutional or governmental action to create the social conditions necessary to the full development of the individual, such as the right to work, decent housing, health care, etc., is another important aspect of the subsidiarity principle.

The idea is that, because humans are social beings, that government should only do things that people cannot do for themselves and cannot do for each other in mediating structures.  Why is this?  Because government is force.  Whenever you have government involved in anything it involves force.  When force enters the equation it means that the normal interactions of humans as social beings has broken down and needs to be compelled, to be forced to provide something that people cannot or will not do themselves.



The fact is that our liberal friends obviously understand that.  Otherwise they would not be trying to change the subject on ObamaCare.   When they say that the issue on Catholic employers is a question of women's reproductive rights, they are saying that reproductive rights are only possible if employers are forced to provide a service that costs $9 per month.  That is a joke.  We are talking here about three lattes a month or a couple of beers.  We are talking about ten percent of the cost of a fully supported iPhone with voice plan and data plan.  Our liberal friends understand very well that they are trespassing on First Amendment rights.  That is why they are changing the subject.



We know what is going on here.  Since time immemorial, politicians have bought the votes of the credulous by offering them free services to be paid for with other peoples' money.  In a way, the smaller this free service, the better.  After all, who can object to the cost of a mere $9 a month.  How cheap can you get?



But the fact is that government is force.  Politics is the threat of force.   And every subsection in a thousand page bill is another little instance where the life of humans as social beings is replaced by government force.  In each case we are talking about something that is removed from flexible social cooperation and replaced by rigid police force.



I suppose that many provisions in any thousand-page bill are not there because of some pressing need, but are really there as a demonstration of power by some organized special interest.  Attention must be paid!  Thus, if you are a feminist, you want to make sure that the nation's comprehensive and mandatory universal health program includes your big issues--contraception and abortion--otherwise you are demonstrating to the world that you don't really count as a power in the land; you are irrelevant.  When the special interests are sitting around the table, it matters that your issue gets added to the grand bargain that reflects your relative weight in the councils of power.



But every new addition to the power of government adds to the phalanx of force, and it diminishes the "autonomy and dignity of the individual."  It also diminishes the autonomy and dignity of all subsidiary institutions of social cooperation below the level of government that imposes its new rule of force.



In the Bush years our liberal friends sometimes became hysterical over the intolerable compulsions that Bush's policy laid upon them.  They do not seem to be so sensitive to the dangers of government force now that they are doing the forcing.



It is wonderful that the Catholic Church has woken up from a sound sleep and manned the ramparts of freedom.  Here's another wonderful thought.  How about we now discuss the forced confinement of children in government custodial facilities from age 7 to age 18?  What does that do to the "autonomy and dignity of the individual" child and its individual parent?

Goodwill and Friendship

Says Aristotle in Nichomachean Ethics IX-5: "Goodwill is a friendly sort of relation". but not the same as friendship.  And the reason is simple.  In goodwill there is not the "intensity or desire"  that arises in "friendly feeling".  We would not necessarily "do anything with" people to whom we feel goodwill but not friendship.

You might say, he writes, that goodwill is "a beginning of friendship", for philia starts with delight in the "form of the beloved".  But delight does not mean love.  Love means a longing when the beloved is absent and a craving for his presence.  The feeling of goodwill does not encompass longing and craving.

Aristotle seems to suggest that goodwill comes close to his definition of his second-class friendship, that based on utility or pleasure, for he says "The man who has received a benefit bestows goodwill in return for what has been done to him".  Yet he denies it, saying that goodwill "does not arise on those terms", i.e., the friendship based on utility or pleasure.  That is because, he says, the exchange of benefits is "only doing what is just"; men are not friends if they cherish each other "for the sake of some use to be made of" the other.  No, Aristotle insists, "goodwill arises on account for some excellence or worth, when one man seems to another beautiful or brave".

If this is so, then Aristotle is proposing that goodwill is the flash of pleasure that, e.g., a man feels when he sees a beautiful woman across the room.  But he has already said that goodwill does not involve "intensity or desire" and that certainly gets involved in the feeling that a man has in the fleeting view of a beautiful woman.

What then does Aristotle mean?  He just wants to say that goodwill is a feeling, the precursor to friendship, a delight in the other.  But it is not, repeat not, to be dirtied with the second-class transactional friendships based on utility and pleasure.  The best friendship is about love, wanting to spend time, to live next to the other person, wanting good for the other person for their own sake, and not a utilitarian quid pro quo.

And yet surely a friendship based upon utility or pleasure could just as easily start with the goodwill that Aristotle approves of, the glance across the room, the good feeling at seeing the beautiful or brave.  We proceed to friendship, because today and tomorrow we could use a bit of beauty, or could enjoy the pleasure of being around a tasty piece of beautiful fluff.

On Aristotle's view of goodwill, his second-class friendship is not really a friendship.  Only the best kind, the friendship between equals, based on love and wanting the best for the other person on their own terms, only that is the real thing.  Goodwill is the precursor to real friendship, the frisson of attraction.  And it is not to be confused with mere pleasure or mere utility.

Is Aristotle Too Egoist?

It is the fashion today to privilege the notion of "altruism" over the notion of selfishness. Things done for another, in the right way at the right time for the right reasons, are considered worthy. Things done to liberate a group of victims of exploitation are beyond reproach. But things done for ourselves, particularly when performed by businessmen and patriarchs, is tainted with the stain of egoism. This Manichean system, stripped of its veil of illusion, is a system, naked, brutal and direct, to privilege government and political action over those of private citizens in the economic sector and civil society.

Thus some may criticize Aristotle's celebration of eudaimonia of the good man in a life of virtue to be "objectionably egoist."

But we should pause for a moment and consider what might be meant by "objectionable egoism." For when Aristotle speaks of "love of self" in Nichomachean Ethics IX-8 he opens the discussion only to differentiate between the self-loving man "who is grasping" with regard to "wealth, honours, and bodily pleasures" and the man who strives for the noblest deeds, and what "is best for itself" and who "does many acts for the sake of his friends and his country". The latter self-loving man is clearly a horse of a different color.

Perhaps we should extend Aristotle's distinctions in self-love further. Both his ideal types are egoists, but the former is clearly a crude egoist, driven merely by "the irrational element of the soul". The other is a rational egoist, who does things for himself according to practical wisdom, in the right way for the right reason at the right time. It is invidious to call the latter an "objectionable egoist" just as it is pointless to dignify the crude selfishness of the man of appetite with the epithet "objectionable."

Perhaps, in Aristotle's time, there were no objectionable egoists. Evidently, our time is different. So who is this "objectionable egoist?" He is not the man of simple appetite; we call him a selfish bastard, and so he is. Nor is he the naïve egoist, the seeker after a successful career in business or the libertarian follower, perhaps, of Ayn Rand. Anyway such a man at least follows a rational principle, and can justify his egoism with the philosophy of sentiment from the Scottish Enlightenment. No, in our time the "objectionable egoist" can be none other than the government university professor or the liberal NGO activist. For these are people that trumpet to the world their selfless altruism while living a life of utter egoism. Nothing can be more objectionable.

Aristotle has a notion of egoism (to the extent that egoism is possible before the separation of body and mind in Descartes) rather different in mind for his eudaimonia, the life of happiness, conducted as a pursuit of virtue adding up to practical wisdom, doing the right thing in the right way for the right reason at the right time. This individual eudaimonia, Aristotle makes clear, this life of happiness, does not occur in a selfish vacuum, but in a life of full social and political connection. The good man does not love himself as a narcissist might, but in the fullness of practical wisdom, acquiring his happiness through his social contribution. The Aristotelian virtues are not what we would now call strategic or instrumental; they are social virtues, and the good man, in acquiring excellence in these virtues—at an appropriate mean between defect and excess—acquires a social excellence, a facility to contribute to the happiness of his friends not for his sake but for their sake, and to his polis because the practice of political science, next to philosophy itself, is the final end and purpose of individual virtue.

In setting up his argument in Book 1 of Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle defines "happiness" as the one thing we choose for itself, for every other good we choose "for the sake of happiness." But this happiness does not exist in a vacuum, sufficient for a solitary man, but occurs in a social context, and includes "parents, children, wife, and in general... friends and fellow citizens, since man is born for citizenship." Thus "the function of man is activity of the soul which follows or implies a rational principle", in accordance with the best and most complete virtue. And that activity extends to "a complete life."

Aristotle does not require that this happiness, this activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete life, occur in a state of self-denial. He looks for a happiness issuing from a complete human flourishing, He sees happiness identified with virtue and with virtuous activity, for "in the Olympic Games it is not the most beautiful and the strongest that are crowned but those who compete". And this life is "pleasant," for "the lovers of what is noble find pleasant the things that are by nature pleasant." Virtue, as we say, is its own reward; it "has its pleasure in itself." Aristotle does not see the world as illusion, and practical activity meaningless. He sees happiness issuing from a real life virtuously led in a real family in a real society in accordance with practical wisdom.

Aristotle does not consider that happiness comes unearned, merely as a gift from the gods, although, he twinkles, if it were a gift of the gods, it would be appropriate, "inasmuch as it is the best." Happiness, he asserts, "comes as a result of virtue and some process of learning and training", the "prize and end of virtue". Happiness is not something that just comes to you; it is the reward of effort and practice.

The practical ethics of Aristotle, celebrating a life of practical wisdom at the virtuous mean between excess and defect, does not satisfy those who yearn for a more salvific meaning of life. From Plato's Republic to Buddha's enlightenment to the Christian idea of poverty to the modern secular religions that define themselves against ordinary human flourishing, Aristotle's eudaimonia represents at best a low bar to aim at and at worst an "objectionable egoism." Plato calls for the destruction of the family and the raising of children by the state. Buddhism calls for a radical departure from ordinary human flourishing as the only way to overcome suffering, and Siddhartha Gautama set the tone by dumping his noble inheritance, his wife and children for a life of contemplation and teaching. Christianity called for complete separation from worldly goods and pursuits, and has ever after wobbled on the edge of an extreme asceticism that rejects the workaday world. The modern secular religions set themselves against the bourgeois ambition and domesticity. They want to bury all egoism and mobilize the entire population in the service of the state, recreating the Prussia of which Mirabeau said it was "not a state with an army, but an army with a state." Even philosophers like William James have found themselves hankering after the moral equivalent of war, celebrating a suspension of normal domestic life in the cause and excitement of moral emergency.

Whatever may be the merits of these utopian fancies, they have not delivered on their promises except when implemented as shadows of themselves. Humans as social animals combine in a mysterious mixture the selfishness of egoism and the selflessness of altruism. They serve others to serve themselves, as Adam Smith declared. Everyone understands that untrammeled egoism is derisive, but not a few imagine that social cooperation means nothing unless it means altruism. Aristotle's life of practical wisdom is a healthy mean between the extremes of selfishness and selflessness. He takes the world as it is, a world of families, of activity, of friendship and politics, and proposes a method not to transform it but to shake a little of the slackness out of it.

It is natural that the good and happy man should "be a lover of self (for he will both himself profit by doing noble acts, and will benefit his fellows)". But he will not shirk his duties as a citizen in his bath of self-love. He does not live congratulating himself on his virtue, for his self-love is a consequence of his happiness, and his happiness a consequence of his living a life of practical wisdom, living the right way for the right reasons at the right time. He is consequently ready to sacrifice his equanimity "for the sake of his friends and his country", ready to "throw away both wealth and honors... gaining for himself nobility" in the activity of the soul following its rational principle.

A man of his times, Aristotle does not worry much about the happiness of women and slaves. But then what modern elitist worries that marriage is collapsing among the white working class and the minority underclass?

Misunderstanding Charles Murray

What is it about liberals, anyway?  Why did they gang-tackle Charles Murray on The Bell Curve? And why does liberal Joan Walsh of Salon miss the point of Murray's latest book, Coming Apart? 

I suppose it's because she sees everything through a lens of social justice, in that everyone's position in society is a consequence of white racism, or a consequence of how much support they get from government.

The point of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 is that the white working class are suffering many of the same pathologies as the minority underclass: a decline in marriage, an increase in single parenthood, a detachment from community organizations, and a retreat among single men from work.

The reason Murray made his book exclusively about whites was that he wanted to detach from his argument any question of racism.  Folks like Joan Walsh live by the accusation of racism.  If brown people are doing badly, it must be due to racism. The argument that Charles Murray wants to make is that if the white working class is experiencing increases in social pathology then something other than racism must be at work.  Maybe it is government programs!

Joan Walsh lives by the notion that a Democratic majority of "the young, women, lower-income blacks, Latinos and Asians" is waiting to take over--if not this year then next.  The suffering white working class could throw a wrench in the works if it votes Republican in 2012, and that would be a pity.  And in due course, social justice activists will have to pay attention to their grievances.

The forces of social justice have always looked out for the rights and singular insights of minority populations. We’re about to have a new one to think about.

And that's even though "low income white people have benefited from the long legal and extralegal history of racial subjugation and white supremacy".

Actually Walsh is wrong about that Democratic majority.  If it forms, it would be the young, single women, all blacks, lower-income Latinos and lower-income Asians.  And I'm not so sure about the young, since they have been disproportionately affected by Obamanomics and might be having second thoughts about hope and change.

But Walsh does make a telling point about white seniors.  The most Republican counties are the ones that get most federal payments, "crop subsidies, housing assistance, and Medicaid payments".  In other words, Republicans are all on welfare.   Tea Party supporters, for instance, have no intention of giving up their Medicare, yet that is just what Paul Ryan and the Republican Party want to do; they want to end Medicare as we know it.

Will white seniors continue to support the Republican Party if it takes away their Medicare and replaces it with a fixed subsidy?  Maybe that would be the issue that creates a Democratic majority.

But that would turn Joan Walsh's social justice notions on their head, because a Republican reform of Medicare would make wealthy seniors--like me--pay more.  So she is hoping for a realignment based upon Republicans making Medicare more progressive?

No wonder she doesn't get the point of Coming Apart.